[adolph]

Very true in that "living standards" is very subjective. When I wrote that I was thinking of London's population loss, not achieving a similar population until the 1300s. And I was thinking of claims that European literacy rates likewise took a long time to recover.

I don't think it is right to say that population loss usually results in higher living standards due to more land per capita. For one, in a pre-industrial society agriculture is labor intensive and the amount of land that can be worked by a person does not scale with land availability. The Black Death [1] economic section works out some of the less than positive impacts.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londinium

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death

[wqaatwt]

> not achieving a similar population until the 1300s

That’s not the necessarily best metric either, though. Roman city sizes (especially Rome itself) very inflated due to centralized state redirecting a lot of tax revenue there.

However in premodern times pretty much all cities universally had negative population growth which would imply they weren’t particularly nice places to live if you had better options.

[adolph]

> However in premodern times pretty much all cities universally had negative population growth which would imply they weren’t particularly nice places to live if you had better options.

Your point is well taken although I must point out that for the above to be true the cities could never exist in the first place.

Depending on where you put the cut-off point of "premodern" the contact between precolumbian and European cultures in North America had some notion that people on the European side would sometimes immigrate to Indian culture but not vice versa. "The Down of Everything" by Graeber and Wengrow [0] goes into transcultural impacts at length. A more original source can be found in a letter by Ben Franklin in 1753 [1]:

  When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and 
  habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one 
  Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that 
  this is not natural to them merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from 
  this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young 
  by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, 
  and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among 
  the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of 
  life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the 
  first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is 
  no reclaiming them.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything

1. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-peter...